Category Archives: management

When people first try scrum, or TDD (or any new process), they feel uncomfortable. We “know how to do” stuff, but then we’re asked to try on something new. Then our comfort zone alarm goes off. We feel constrained. Scrum puts limit on sprints, so we’ll need to actually help the testers finish testing our story.

Uncle Bob Martin recently blogged about the hordes of untrained developers coming into the industry, which eventually leads to some huge software disasters. James Bach wrote about the failures of HealthCare.gov that stemmed from incompetence in software management. These are very good articles, that make you think: Should software professionals (developers, testers, managers) be regulated?

Last week I went to a presentation about Scaled Agile Framework – SAFe. I’ve read a bit about it before, but this was a more broad introduction to the topic. It’s going to be a success. When I talk about why scrum succeeded in crossing the chasms from developer world to business world, the main

When I was a developer, I couldn’t understand why other developers were not as competent as me. When I was a team leader, I couldn’t understand why my team didn’t measure up to my glorified project saving success. When I joined Typemock, I couldn’t understand why most developers are prepared to live in bug-world, rather

Had great fun today at the Agile Practitioners 2013 conference today. Great keynotes by Boris Gloger and Dan North and great presentations by others, as well as meeting old and new faces. For the ones who missed my presentation, and those who want to feast their eyes again, here are the slides:

There are many agile conferences these days. Many of them are not about what we used to call “agile” anymore. In fact, a friend pointed out when I mentioned a TDD session from an agile conference, saying: Really? An agile presentation with code? Most of the topics today are moving towards lean, kanban, leadership and

Here’s another example of why language matters, and how the words we choose matter so much. I tried to join the European Lean-Kanban tour, not in person, but on twitter. (By the way, seems like an awesome tour, I’m thinking about going there next time around). And then the following tweet comes up: “@cyetain: Talking

I have a big mouth. The kind that doesn’t shut up, especially when it needs to. I thought this was a development in my adult life. Alas, no. Recently I went to my first school reunion, and the people confirmed I had this situation back then too. Usually it’s not a problem, and if it

Let’s say we’ve “conquered agile”, and the prophecy came true: we have a self-organizing team. How does leadership fit into this? What does a leader do in a self-organizing team? Influence. Leadership comes in many shapes and colors. There’ll be the technical leaders. The experts about technology and or process. There’ll be social-political leaders. We’ll

When I was a young developer, there was a re-org in the company. I found myself a team leader. That is the normal thing in software organizations (and I assume also in others) – you get a promotion because you’re competent enough in your current job. It’s not stupid (although many times with disastrous results),